THE SILK CARTOGRAPHER

Chang'an, 638 CE. The greatest empire in the world is hiding a secret, and someone is killing everyone who knows it.

Lian Shu has spent eight years making herself invisible. A cartographic scribe at the Tang Dynasty's Imperial Bureau of Maps, she drafts surveys under a man's name, conceals her true abilities behind careful mediocrity, and keeps her grandfather's forbidden silk scroll hidden in the hem of her coat. The scroll shows a hidden corridor through Central Asia a military passage so strategically devastating that its existence alone could trigger a war between empires. Her grandfather's last instruction was simple: show it to no one. Never show it to the Emperor.

Then the cartographers begin to die.

When a senior Bureau colleague is found at his desk with his eyes removed and the character for "silence" written beside him in his own blood, Lian understands the message immediately. Someone knows the scroll exists. Someone is clearing the witnesses. And the Imperial Inspector assigned to the case is a man she has not seen in fourteen years: her mother's brother, General Wei Jinglong the man she has always suspected and never been able to prove.

With hours before his investigation reaches her name, Lian accepts the protection of Rashid al-Tirmizi, a Sogdian merchant and member of the Yilmaz Compact, a centuries-old guild that has spent three hundred years keeping dangerous knowledge out of the hands of any single empire. Their destination: Samarkand, where an exiled Persian scholar may be able to decode the scroll's hidden second layer. What they find there will send them further west than either intended through the ruins of Ctesiphon, across the mountains of Khorasan, and finally to the gold-domed city of Constantinople, where Lian's uncle is waiting, and where the truth about the corridor, and about her own bloodline, will demand a reckoning she has been preparing for her entire life.

The Silk Cartographer is a literary historical thriller set at the cosmopolitan heart of the seventh-century Silk Road a world of Sogdian merchants, Tang court intrigue, Byzantine politics, and the quiet, extraordinary power of a woman who makes maps. It is a story about the weapons that knowledge becomes in the wrong hands, the cost of hiding in plain sight, and the particular courage required to stop surviving and start building something of your own.

Perfect for readers of Laini Taylor's Strange the Dreamer, Kate Quinn's The Rose Code, and Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See.